Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  He rolled upright on his creaky bed, pulled on his shoes and headed out for his evening walk. Without the fresh air there would be no hope of sleep. He went the long way, down the shore road, past the beach café – now shuttered with its “minerals” and “confectionery” signs painted out. He paced past the steels in the holding pens of the port, gazing at the cranes and the old lighthouse, no longer blinking. Then he made his way through to the point, the tarmac of the terminal.

  In truth, it wasn’t much of a landing – a wide slipway with pillars to allow the small car ferry to buffer against in the tide. The free movement of people, he thought, and took up his customary lean by the orange life ring, gazing across the lough at a state he hated, where he had been reared, and which he missed terribly.

  “Paul!”

  The manager flinched. Had he imagined it?

  “Paul!”

  He looked down into the gloom, searching in panic at the water’s surface.

  “You’re ok, Paul, we’re friendlies.”

  The manager’s head told him to run but his body was frozen in panic.

  “Paul, listen.”

  The manager hunted the darkness beneath his feet but could see nothing. The voice wasn’t shouting, but rasping, over the lap of the sea on the rocks.

  “We’ve got a boat here. Your wife has already accepted help. She’s on her way to a new life in a new country. We’ll take you to her.”

  The manager had always half expected an approach, but not like this. They usually turned up in suits at the barracks after an arrest.

  “Not interested,” he called at the sea, still unsure where the voice was coming from and utterly confused.

  “Up to you, Paul, but you’ve no wife to go home to. Kids are away too, and their families. They chose to leave … after what you did.”

  “I did fuck all,” he barked at the reflection of the moon.

  “Police were looking for you. They arrested your wife. The whole estate saw it.”

  “Why would they lift her?”

  “To find you. She’s gone now. She took the soup.”

  “She wouldn’t have done that,” the manager said, trying to persuade himself.

  “That bomb killed kids. Your family’s dirt in your town. None of them were interested in hanging around.”

  “They wouldn’t leave.”

  “All gone. You’ve nothing to go back to.”

  There was silence for a solid minute.

  “Where?” he said, eventually.

  “Nicer place than you came from anyway.”

  “The grandkids?”

  “All of them. So make-your-mind-up time. You can join her and have a new life, or stay here and eventually get extradited.”

  “I’m not a tout.”

  “Up to you. But they can place you in the town with Deirdre Rushe. You’re either coming with us or you’re going to jail. No doubt about it.”

  The manager’s head was reeling. Would his son have left with the grandchildren?

  “There’s a boat down here.”

  The manager turned to look at the dilapidated ferry port, then at the lights of the occupied north. “No,” he said.

  “Alright, last chance. You’ll not see them grow up. We’re leaving now.”

  The manager’s muscles flexed then relaxed. This is a trick. This must be a trick. He stepped up onto the metal crossbar and swung his leg over the top railing, turning to lower himself onto the slippery rocks. “Where are you?” he called.

  “Keep coming down to the tide,” Sam said. His body was still immersed, his heart hammering. He knew the opso’s team could well be watching and hoped his heat signature was concealed by the freezing water. He wanted the DET to think the manager was on the cusp of suicide. He heard a stumble and a slip. “Easy, Paul, just keep coming. Listen to my voice and keep coming towards me. Have you a phone in your pocket?”

  “No.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At the digs.”

  “Ok. Come on, just a few feet more.”

  “Where’s this boat?” Panic crept into his voice. The manager’s head loomed black against the floodlights behind.

  “I’ll bring it over now,” Sam said. “You need to come down here to the water’s edge.”

  “There’s no fucking boat,” the manager said, turning suddenly and slipping on the weed of a rock.

  Sam struck like a crocodile, reaching out of the water and catching the manager’s ankle, hauling him to a slip and a yell. He hoped for consciousness as he heard his head crack a stone. Sam hove hard and got a knee, then a belt, then a shoulder and pulled his mark into the water.

  The manager struggled as Sam spoke in his ear. “Easy now, easy. This’ll be handier if you just let it happen.”

  The manager struggled and kicked but Sam’s arm was round his neck and his legs were kicking powerfully away from the shore.

  “I’ll take you to the boat, but I need to know where the bomb was made. D’ye understand, Paul? I need to know who made the bomb.” Sam struggled to stay afloat and speak at the same time with the manager across his belly.

  “There’s no boat,” the manager babbled.

  “How d’ye think I got here?” Sam panted.

  The manager settled a little. “Donegal,” he said.

  “Where in Donegal?”

  “Where’s the boat?” the manager said.

  “Who made it?”

  “Two brothers.”

  “Names?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Last chance,” Sam said. They were five hundred metres offshore and he could feel the current gripping them and drawing them out of the lough towards the open sea.

  “I don’t know.” The manager’s voice was calming, his body succumbing to the temperature of the tide.

  “What do they do?”

  “Make bombs.”

  “For work – what do they work at?”

  “Smugglin’. Where’s this boat?”

  “Smuggling what?”

  Sam could feel the manager’s resignation as the carcass on top of him deflated and gave up.

  “There’s no boat,” he said.

  “No,” said Sam. “There’s no boat.”

  “I’m dead,” said the manager.

  “Yes,” said Sam, and let him go.

  Their bodies separated and in moments Sam had lost sight of the manager. He lay on his side and began the long crawl inshore to avoid the worst of the tide, before steering a course back to the marina.

  Unless he’d been picked up from above, his old colleagues would have to believe the manager had done himself in.

  22

  “What the actual fuck, Libby?”

  She had never heard her superior swear before.

  “He’s only missing. He’s run, I guess. We’ll pick him up quickly.”

  “You hope he has done a runner, you mean, but he could just as easily be dead.”

  “We’ll find him,” she said, but in her heart she feared she’d lost another one.

  “The chatter is not good, Libby, not good at all.”

  “What chatter?”

  “Social media, messages, calls – known dissidents. They know he’s gone missing. His family said they haven’t heard from him in two days. You can guess the rest.”

  “What?”

  “They’re saying we took him.”

  “Like, turned him?”

  “No, that would suit us rather well. On the contrary, they are saying state forces are up to old tricks.”

  “What, like, killed him?”

  “There was a time,” he mused.

  “The olden days.” The words were out before she realised what she’d said, but she was tiring of war stories spun long before she’d even been born. Her superior chose to either ignore the comment or file it away as another example of her unsuitability for discreet work.

  “Put yourself in their shoes, Libby. They are looking at two of their own dead in Ballycastle. An idiot wit
h a smashed jaw who says he was attacked by a professional. Then we have a dead man in – of all places – a police station, one of the most heavily fortified in the United fucking Kingdom and some hard-hatted assassin walks in and beats him to death with a hammer.”

  Libby saw his point but stayed quiet.

  “Now the manager’s wife and children are preparing to hold white-line pickets claiming state collusion in murder. So, I repeat, Libby – what the actual fuck is going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what is this unit doing? What sort of fucking leadership are you giving these bloody people?” he suddenly shouted.

  Something inside her cracked short of snapping. She was damned if she was going to take the blame for what he had ordered.

  “You told me to divert all attention to the boss. You told me to take eyes off the manager.”

  “I did not tell you to stop doing your bloody job. Does that mean you bring a halt to gathering?”

  “How can we gather if we take eyes off the main protagonists? I’m sorry, but that’s what you told me to do.”

  “Think, Libby,” he said, suddenly calmer.

  “Think what?” She had her dander up and her mind could see nothing but the fire of indignation.

  “This does look like something we have the capacity to do, does it not?”

  Libby’s mouth fell open in disbelief, her shoulders plunged towards the desk, hands flat on the surface, fingers spread. “What?”

  “If we decided to remove certain people without leaving any sort of traceable lead—”

  “I don’t under …”

  “Think, Libby. Think. How has someone killed four people right under our noses? We are the best in the world at this caper, are we not? We have the best tech, the best-trained people, and yet, and yet, someone has killed four suspects without us having so much as a sliver of an idea who it is.”

  Libby was reeling. “You’re saying it’s one of us?” Her mind took her immediately to the Mass rock and a recent conversation.

  “Where would an assassin get such information? Who the bomb team was, where they were living or hiding?”

  “The police?” Libby ventured.

  “For that chap Grim, perhaps. For Deirdre Rushe, possibly. But that does not explain how they were taken out while we had them under surveillance, does it? And there is another glaring flaw in that argument.”

  Libby knew it. “The manager.”

  “Quite. Nobody was supposed to know where the manager was. Nobody other than us. And we can tell from interrogation of the police database that they had no clue as to where he was either. So who knew?”

  “The dissies themselves? He had a phone.”

  “And we have every word they utter monitored, recorded and transcribed. They’re not eating themselves, Libby, not yet. This is not some feud like they used to get into in the ’80s.”

  “You really think it’s one of our own?”

  “No, much worse than that.”

  “What’s worse?”

  “I think it is one of yours,” he said.

  The clerk’s brother left it four days before linking back into the chat room he used with like-minded people in faraway bedrooms. It took two years to be approved for membership and the tiniest slip-up was guaranteed to result in expulsion.

  His latest post had returned sixteen suggestions. Fourteen pointed him in the same direction: China. Not that anyone said China; that would be stupid. He and his friends had developed their own language that couldn’t be explained or taught. It required careful learning over a long time in a black corner of an unsearchable space on the dark web. It wasn’t like leetspeak, used in the fledgling days of the internet. Their speak was refined, constantly shifting. He had no doubt that the NSA and similar organisations were constantly cracking it, so they kept moving and modifying, trying to stay a step ahead. Not that they were in the business of bringing down of governments. They were simply curious, hunting for gaps in the digits that would reveal openings. It was coding for the love of code. Nobody in their group was naïve – there could be spooks lurking, posing as one of them, but it wasn’t an issue so long as they didn’t try to bring down a superpower.

  So from his bedroom in a Belfast council flat that he shared with his ageing mother and her crippling arthritis, he whiled away his nights looking at the weaknesses in the defences of businesses. Where those vulnerabilities proved serious, he’d drop them a line and occasionally earn himself the price of a highly specced car by offering advice on how to close the chinks. He had built quite a reputation among lead developers and product managers in big corporations. It was lucrative, yet he neither declared a penny of it nor spent it; he wouldn’t know what to spend it on.

  But now they knew his worth – the Brits, or whoever his sister had fallen foul of. They’d probably looked at his earnings, scattered around the globe, in crypto. He could stand to lose it all, not that that would bother him greatly, but he wouldn’t function in a prison. If they found a way to take him from his screen and make him stare at the wall, that would be too much of a struggle. He wouldn’t cope with talking to other men. The only people he verbally spoke to were his ailing mother and his sister. They had always looked out for him – protected his peculiarity and kept him from those who could potentially harass him. He knew that his mind functioned differently to others, but he was ok with that. He only wished his mum and his sister were.

  So, the Orientals. He could see why the Chinese wanted that sort of tool, but dabbling with them was likely to land him in trouble. This was not a decision to take lightly. He heard his sister on the stairs – his mother couldn’t manage the climb, and his door opened.

  “Would you not turn on a light at least?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “And open a window. It smells like fish in here.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Mum says she hasn’t seen you today?”

  “Been working.”

  “On what?”

  “This thing for you.”

  “Is that what you want to ask me?”

  “I can do what you want, probably. But it’s dangerous.”

  “It’s already dangerous.”

  “For you.”

  “Well, thanks, little brother, for your concern.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “You can’t get caught doing this type of thing.”

  “Well, then, what’s the problem?” she said.

  “No, I mean if you get caught, you’re in jail. Immediate.”

  “Immediately,” she corrected him.

  Water off a duck’s back. “Maybe in America.”

  “Serious?” she said.

  “Serious-ly,” he replied. He might be odd but he was a million miles from stupid.

  “Well, they already know about your extracurricular activities, so I suppose if they want to do you, they can anyway.”

  “Can they arrest you too?” he asked.

  “Probably.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Something stupid.”

  “What about Mum? If we both go to jail.”

  His sister just stared at him. She had no answer to that. “How can you stand being in this room all the time? It’s just like prison.”

  “It’s really not,” he said, and he knew she understood.

  “How big’s the risk?”

  “Using a Chinese platform, if I input the image, it will probably find her. But then someone somewhere will probably ask – why the interest in her?”

  “And what will they do then?”

  “Who knows? Depends who she is.”

  The sister thought for a while. They hadn’t much to lose. They were already being blackmailed, and once you start it never stops.

  “Do it.”

  “What about Mum?”

  “Mum will be ok,” she said, but she wasn’t at all sure that was true.

  The brother turned to the
screen. He lifted a small pen-like tool to a pad and conjured the image of Libby taken from his sister’s phone. He spliced the video into a series of screen grabs and deployed them into the dark fibre tunnels of cyberspace.

  “What now?” his sister asked.

  “We wait.”

  The opso tried to shake off the notion straight after it happened, but it niggled. Libby and her attitude towards him in the ops room.

  He’d greeted her with a smile and she’d visibly shuddered. Ordinarily it would have been easy to dismiss as pressure or fatigue, but they’d spent what he thought was a good day together in the hills of south County Down. They’d talked and even laughed a little; there had been lunch in a gully and dinner in a seafood restaurant. It had all been very pleasant. And now she was stammering excuses to get away from him.

  “The mark’s not moved in a day. Just wondering if he’s still breathing,” was all she said in greeting.

  The opso couldn’t quite make out whether that was a jibe or a deflection. “We have the house covered front and back and we have audio inside. Is there any suggestion that things aren’t right in there?”

  “Well, he beat the shit out of his wife,” she said.

  “Is that what’s wrong?” The opso settled on a diagnosis for Libby’s fractiousness and prepared himself for the backlash – but none came.

  “Just make sure this one doesn’t follow the others,” she snapped as she swept out of the room, ceding oversight.

  The opso looked round at the staff at the monitor bank. “I take it she’s been up all night?” he asked.

  “She only just arrived – her coffee’s still warm. Must be something you said.” One of the old hands smiled.

  “She’s cranky today.”

  “She’s full of questions too.”

  “Like what?”

  “She wanted the manifests for the days Deirdre Rushe and her old man were killed, and the names of everyone involved when Grim was bumped off.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you give them to her?”

  “Yeah. Should I have waited?”

  “No, no, that’s ok. We’re here to share with our intelligence colleagues.”